Jeane Dixon

Jeane L. Pinckert Dixon was a Catholic who attributed her psychic abilities to God and became the country’s most prominent psychic who moved freely in celebrity and conservative political circles, most famous for supposedly predicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

She was born in Medford, WI to a rich family of German immigrants in the lumber industry. She grew up in California and in 1939 married James L. Dixon, an auto dealer who later worked in real estate. They were well off, so in later decades Dixon would donate her psychic earnings to a children’s charity she started, Children to Children Inc.

The Kennedy prophecy is what made her famous. On March 11, 1956, Parade magazine discussed the upcoming 1960 presidential election:

Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. He will be assassinated or die in office "though not necessarily in his first term."

As we all know, Kennedy won the 1960 presidential race, though labor had relatively little to do with it, and the assassination was a pretty safe prediction considering the Presidential Curse. But what they don’t tell you is that in 1960, she predicted that Richard Nixon would win instead.

A 1965 book called "A Gift of Prophecy: the Phenomenal Jeane Dixon" by Ruth Montgomery popularized the Kennedy assassination prediction and sold 3 million copies. This helped her get the astrology column and those annual predictions that were a staple of that tabloidThe Star for so many years.

Temple University math professor John Allen Paulos coined the phrase the "Jeane Dixon effect" to describe the tendency of many to remember the ‘successful’ prophecies while quickly forgetting the failed ones. Over the decades, those failed ones include:

Dixon was chummy with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and he provided her with bits of right-wing propaganda about the Soviet Union funding unrest and left-wing groups in the 1960s. In a plan approved personally by Hoover (his signature appears on a memo approving it in Dixon’s FBI file), she made innumerable speeches attacking the left with this disinformation.

During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, first ladyNancy Reagan employed the services of Dixon to plan her husband’s presidential schedule, until she decided that Dixon had lost her powers and unceremoniously dumped her for astrologer Joan Quigley.